The beginning

We’re currently in week five of our project! But before we start updating this blog with our findings, progress and hurdles, allow me to explain exactly what we’re doing here.

As explained before, we’re two Dutch students developing a game for the Android OS. This project, dubbed Firedroid for now, will count towards our Minor Credits. So this is no mere hobby project, but something enabling us to get our degree in Multimedia. That said, we’ve got five glorious months to make the most kick-ass game we can imagine with very little previous experience. Be sure, we’ve made games before in Java and Flash, but they’re hard to compare to the scale of the game we plan to crank out this time.

So, what have we got planned?

After brainstorming and conceptualizing for about two weeks, we got our hearts set on a time management game.
Our amazing theme will be pirates, because who doesn’t love bearded, rum-guzzling, cussing sailors.

We’ve chosen to develop for Android OS instead of the populair iPhone for a couple of reasons. Firstly, Google is very supportive of developers. They have an excellent Software Development Kit, a useful emulator and update frequently, not to mention Android is nearly completely open source. Secondly, Android runs on a number of devices. When we first started the project, 18 phones were available with the Google software with more being released this year. This means it’s a growing market, especially due to the release of budget models which will enable the less wealthy amongst us to enjoy a good smartphone. This ties in with getting a phone for us to develop on, which Google offers readily. Lastly, we felt Android needed some love too, concerning games.

So there you have it. Currently, I’m spending my time making a paper prototype to test our initial concept, figuring out object placement on the screen and everything else that ties in with preliminary graphic design, while Roy is absorbing as much programming information as he can muster, as this project shifts him from Flash/PHP/Javascript to the mathematically wonderful world of game programming, OpenGL and all the headaches that come with it.